practical network management

["25833-Wendell Lansford(F039" <[e-mail]>]

I am in the process of defining and implementing a new
corporate-wide network management paradigm.  We use an 
SNMP-based management station and other third-party applicaitons.
We are also trailing third-party relational database backend.  
Such a system, if properly administered, can be a powerful 
analytical and diagnostic tool.  However, A difficult problem
seems to be determining what management data is useful.
There is an over-abundance of data accessible in the various
proprietary and standard MIBs.  While we can pontificate about 
the details of standards and consortiums, a thread delving 
into network managment strategies, experiences, and practicalities 
may also prove beneficial to a number of us. 

Does anyone care to share experiences regarding data collection,
aggregation, trending, and analysis?  How are people accomplishing
fault, configuration, security, performance, and accounting 
management?  What data is important/valuable, either in an abstract 
sense (such as utilization of WAN links or CPU utilization on a 
router) or on a specfic level (such as SNMP-MIBII-ifInput)?  
While such questions are obviously subjective, I believe that 
one can learn from another's experiences nonetheless.  It often 
seems that functions of mib variables (such as the link utilization 
as a function of ifInOctets, ifOutOctets, and ifSpeed) are of great 
interest, as Allan Leinwand pointed out in his article in Vol. 1 
No. 5 of _The_Simple_Times_.  The ability to aggregate such data 
and monitor its trends has further value.

Our environment is made of up diverse network architectures 
(ethernet, FDDI, token ring, SNA) and protocols (TCP/IP, 
AppleTalk, IPX, etc) and spans several locations in the
wide area.  We have a primarily routed internetwork, but 
still maintain a number of bridges.  

Network management is a complex task.  I could stand to learn something
from other's perspectives.  Any info would be appreciated.

This may be more appropriate for the netmgrs mailing list, but I lost
the address.

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Wendell Lansford                        Bell Communications Research
[e-mail]                 3 Corporate Place, PYA-2E212
[phone]                          Piscataway, New Jersey 08854
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